With race driving a wedge in the UK, will things get worse before they get better?

After living in Britain for more than two decades, an academic wonders if rising xenophobia and more visible racism are reasons for her to return to Singapore and the safe familiarity - and responsibilities - of being in an ethnic majority.

- Tan Shzr Ee

On the day of the Tommy Robinson anti-immigrant march, flag-cosseted, bulky men crowded me into a corner of the platform at Tottenham Court Road station.

I inched away to catch the next train by the skin of my teeth. Friends who'd come into town for an East Asian writers' festival reported similar incidents up and down the various Tube lines. British pals tried to reassure me: "They're from the Midlands and the North. They don't represent the UK..."

But 120,000 bodies represent something - especially when the last Gaza march, for comparison, was smaller.

A few days later, on a train line near Kew Gardens, a young man - greasy-maned in steampunk leather, accent posh and drawly (that is, not just your typical working-class white person often seen in anti-immigrant marches) - proclaimed to a carriage half full of people of colour on their way to work: "Standing proud with my flag. One of the best things in life is the ability to hate. Long live hatred."

People side-eyed awkwardly. No one challenged him. British politesse? Or British fear? Where were all the upstanding allies who had proclaimed solidarity on Facebook posts?

All of this ran quite counter to the Singapore of the 1980s, where I grew up as a third-generation Chinese within the demographic majority. I never had to think about "fitting in". (More on this later, including the what-ifs of not being in the ethnic majority of our island-state.)

The system ran on my sociocultural settings. When 75 per cent of the population share broad expectations of behaviour, school and work norms tend to drift towards them. I could take for granted that the world would understand me, or at least meet me halfway.

Then I moved overseas in the late 1990s and had to reorganise myself around a brand-new structure that is 80 per cent white.

SOMETIMES HYPER-VISIBLE, SOMETIMES INVISIBLE